


How She Has Burned

by Ayulsa (execharmonious)



Series: Gods and Monsters [1]
Category: Armitage III
Genre: Continuation, Cussing Like Motherfucking Sailors, Cyberpunk, Gen, Machine Empathy, Parent-child relationships, Post-Canon, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Robot Feels, Robots, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-01-22
Packaged: 2017-11-25 07:45:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/636681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/execharmonious/pseuds/Ayulsa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>What was a feminist, if not a woman fighting for her right to live?</i> </p><p>A cyborg's loyalty to her kind. A madman's genius reborn. Are these the seeds of new hope, or new conflict? Set a short while after the series; ignores Dual-Matrix.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Within The Church

**Author's Note:**

> _"The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy." --Dr. Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner_

" _For open int A equals zero. Semicolon. A less than target dot size, open-close. Semicolon, plus plus A... close._ "

Alone in the dark, she intoned the words in a breathy chant, a half-whisper, half-hum that blended with the susurrating swell of computer fans and the purring of hard drives. The terminal before her, nevertheless, was able to pluck the words from the static, their steady flow across the screen a dim pulse of light that barely brightened the room at all.

_for (int a=0; a <target.size(); ++a)_

She didn't need it to. She hadn't even noticed the emulated sunset, long since expired now: her voice, these words, these waveforms transforming from sound to light, this was all the illumination she needed.

Somewhere in the outpouring of thought and light she recalled books she'd read back at Danich Hill, her father's old Earth books, yellow-stained and full of outdated pop-psych. She'd read them anyway, because she was bored and he'd given her a drive to learn. _A man's work,_ they'd said, _is building, constructing, the fitting together of pieces; it is angles and absolutes. A woman nurtures, ripens, brings forth the soft and swelling light._

She'd always figured it for sexist bullshit - they said the Martians had no notion of feminism, but what was a feminist, if not a woman fighting for her right to live? Still, now she knew as much, here at this terminal where she whispered in prayer, the pieces sliding into place one by one as they grew into something greater than their sum. She was the structure and the guidance, she was builder and procreator, she was coder and nurturer, the architect and the passionate breath of new life. She was, in her small way, a god: absurd as that notion was to a cyborg, a creature twice-removed from God if the religions were to be believed, man made in God's image, cyborg made in man's. The only touch of a god's hands on her nascent soul had been lines of machine code, just like this.

Yet as she worked on gestating the artificial brain, she could believe there was something sacred in it. _The ghost in the machine. The whisper in the code._ Her heart seemed to clench and swell in time with her speaking, the darkness buzzing with some invisible energy, the lights that flickered across the screen the thin lacing that drew it all together. Breathing was a vestigial function in Thirds, but she felt like she was holding hers.

If there was a god, then he - or she - was as present in this as in any birth, and this maze of cables was a church, a font, a lectern at which the Word was preached. The Word that begat life.

  
 _{_  
 _m_dWeights[a] += LearningRate * Influence * (target[a] - m_dWeights[a]);_  
 _}_    
 _}_  
  
 _#endif_


	2. 1: To His Face

"We're dying, Julian."

"Hey, speak for yourself." The rendered image of Julian leaned back against the wall: all artifice, since there was no wall and there was no Julian, not physically, not any more. "I'm doing just fine. Well, I mean, if you want to get technical I'm already dead, but." He patted the wall; it made no sound. "It's not so bad in here."

Armitage shook her head, strands of hair lagging behind the rest. The backup servers hadn't been built for graphical prowess, much less that needed to handle rendering their bodies accurately: they stood naked, anatomically vague, toylike imitations of themselves. _As if we need reminding that we're dolls,_ she thought bitterly.

"This is serious, all right? Out of all the Thirds, there are two of us left. Two. And you're--" She spread her arms wide. "--stuck in this place, and I'm..."

"Lonely?"

Armitage flushed, a poor representation of her actual mood. "...I just don't want to be the only one in this world," she admitted, her features falling in an approximation of regret. Loss, perhaps; grief. "I don't want everything we are, everything we were... The Thirds, my father's work, there was so much potential. I don't want it to die with me." Her gaze flicked to the wall. Its untextured blankness held no pattern, nothing that could even pretend to have captured her interest. She felt mocked. "The Thirds-- my father wouldn't have put so much effort into us just to use us as a political bargaining chip, a-- a stepping stone for Martian independence." She waved an arm in Julian's direction. "Why make you? If reproduction was the only purpose, what's the point in making a male child? My father saw a place in the world for us. He believed that robots could be more than just dolls... we could have life. And I want to fight for it."

Julian could barely read the expressions flickering across her face simulation, but he didn't have to: he'd seen their equivalents in reality often enough. It was obvious what she was thinking. She needed to believe that she hadn't been just another experiment, a step along Asakura's path to something greater. She needed to justify her own existence.

It was never something he'd been concerned about, exactly. Perhaps, he thought, he was just too incurious. As long as he was alive, nothing else really seemed to matter that much. But Armitage had always been different-- always been driven, in some way that he couldn't quite grasp.

He supposed someone had to be.

"So you want to build new Thirds."

"And a body for you, too," she added, smiling.

Well, for all his talk about liking the place, he thought, he wouldn't say no to having an actual body again. "Do you know how?"

She shook her head. "That's the problem. Between you and me, I think we could handle the architecture of the mind, but... Father never trained me in robot science. As far as building a body's concerned, I wouldn't know where to start."

"It's sure a pity he's not around any more." Julian said with a smile and a shrug, then flinched as Armitage threw a scowl his way. "Hey, what? I _said_ it was a pity."

"He was my father," said Armitage, her simulated eyes suddenly blurred by a wet sheen. "And yours, too. And he was-- he was the only-- the only one who knew--"

Julian made a move towards his sister, preparing to comfort her, but a new thought froze him where he was. "No," he said, slowly, testing out the words. "No, he wasn't."

Armitage blinked away tears, the realisation dawning on her too. "D'anclaude... I didn't even think." She refocused on Julian. "But he's dead now, too..."

"Is he? Seems to me from the story you told, you don't rightly know _where_ he is. You got separated at Shinora Hospital, right? You really think that old bastard gave up the ghost so easy, after all the trouble he put you through?"

"Rene D'anclaude." She repeated the name, almost to herself, trying to wrap her head around the same question Julian was. "But even if he is alive, why would he help us?"

"He wouldn't, of course." A slow grin spread across Julian's face. "But that's never been a problem for you, right?"

 

She stretched out her limbs, their sensation numbed from being frozen in pose. Coming back into her body after a trip to the server always made her feel heavy. Testing her voice, she let out a small groan, and heard a sound from across the room in response.

"Hey." Ross's bulky frame moved into her field of vision. "There you are. You'd been in there so long, I was worried you weren't ever gonna come out."

"Was talking to Julian," she mumbled, still getting used to the sound of her voicebox vibrating in her skull. She felt stupid as soon as she'd said it: of course she'd been talking to Julian - there wasn't any other reason for her to upload, except for backups, and her weekly backup had already been made. But the conversation, the emotions surrounding it, had left her mind a tangled mess of conflicting impulses, and she wasn't sure how to begin articulating them. Even to Ross.

Especially to Ross, perhaps; but that didn't seem right-- and yet she'd been discussing it so easily with Julian just a moment ago. Between the two of them, cyborgs both - not that there was much "org" left in Julian - there was so much that could go unspoken, taken for granted. Ross was still new to all of this. She fumbled for the words as she extricated herself from the upload chair's wires and restraints, trying to think of how best to present her plan.

"...Go after D'anclaude? You're shitting me." Okay, maybe her presentation could have used some work. "After all that time we spent getting free of him?"

Armitage smirked. "Actually, as I recall, we were the ones pursuing him."

"The point is, we've got a life now. A home. A kid. We're off the radar... for now. If you go getting yourself in the thick of things again... well, who's to say what trouble it'll pull down on our heads."

"I did think about that, you know." She hopped down from the chair. "But the way I see it... well, our life's always going to be risk. And it's a risk I'm willing to take." The look that crossed his face suggested he wasn't. "What, did you think things were going to be sunshine and roses from now on? Thought we were gonna settle down into a nice, comfortable routine?" She grinned, swung a playful punch at his chest, but he didn't flinch. His gaze on hers was as heavy as ever.

"It's just... well, we're lucky." His tone sought out some kind of reaction from her, something she wasn't feeling. "We got away. All of us. Alive." He sighed. "Is this really more important to you than that? Than us?"

A strange, chilled sensation wrapped around her insides, pulling tight. She knew what the answer was, and she knew that he knew it too.

He pushed anyway. "Your daughter?"

She pulled her arms to her chest, withdrawing, and her gaze caught her skin: the places where it had torn away, where biopolymer stretched transparently thin and gave way to metal plating, exposed circuitry. She traced one of the conduits with her finger, feeling the jump of life inside. Life - yet nothing like the life he was talking about now. Life - yet nothing that Mars would protect.

She thought of the child, still barely born, no doubt snuggled in her crib back at home under the watchful eye of her Second nurse. Guilt lanced through her at the recollection of her face, the knowledge that she was _meant_ to feel some other way-- yet what part of that child was truly hers? Even having given birth to her, what part shared her pattern, her design, knew or would ever know life as something more than flesh and blood?

"You'll be okay," she said, and the response came as if he had spoken, though she knew it was just an old memory.

_You're cold, lady._

_Yeah. I always will be._


	3. 2: Among The Lost

In order to stay on Mars unchallenged, they'd camouflaged themselves in blandness: got an apartment in an up-and-coming part of town, disguised themselves as doting newlyweds with a baby on the way. Now Armitage was going against all that deliberately. Rene D'anclaude, the real D'anclaude, was a human man: unlike a cyborg, he left little trace in the ethereal web of data that crisscrossed the planet, and now that he wasn't committing murders left and right, tracking him was no easy task. She had to make him come to her.

The slum side of St. Lowell settled around her like a shroud, almost homey in its familiarity. Living on the bright side had its perks, but here among the mazy, half-broken-down streets, where everyone was some kind of illegal or outcast, was where she came alive. Here was a place where at least some of the layers of pretense could be stripped off, where she no longer had to maintain the illusion of _Naomi Armitage, the housewife_ but could be something closer to her true self. _Armitage, the Third._

The realisation made her flinch, guilt-laden images of her partner and daughter once again crossing her mind. She'd given up a lot to be with Ross, and here, under the harsh neon glow that made everything look different, she was starting to realise how much she regretted it. Not him-- no, she didn't regret him. But the choices she'd had to make-- the person she'd had to at least pretend to become; the person she might end up becoming for real, if she didn't keep herself on her toes.

_Is that the real reason you're out here, Armitage? Not for their sake, but because you're worried that without a little danger in your life, you'll end up going soft? Is this all just some ego-trip game?_

Besides, hadn't Ross given up a lot, too? He'd thrown away a good career, risked his life multiple times, and now he was living in hiding, too, all for her sake. _You should be grateful,_ a part of her said.

The other part looked down at her tattered skin, the cyborg life that pulsed beneath, and remembered.

_Seconds piled high in the streets, the smell of charred artificial flesh filling the air. Protestors' faces twisted with hate. Spittle flying, boots stomping, hands yanking out the viscera of machines._

As much as Ross had sacrificed, he-- and her child-- weren't threatened in the same way she and Julian were. Ross was a wanted man now, yes, but not under threat of destruction, disassembly, being tossed on the scrap heap. And he could live on secure in the knowledge that there would always be humans: that his kind would continue, through their daughter, or if not her, then the collective power of the species. Their way of life, the knowledge they'd gained, all that made it worthwhile to live, to create, did not teeter on the brink of extinction.

Hers had only just begun, and yet its light was already fading.

The signage of a bar caught her eye-- _Manning's_ : surely no relation-- and on a whim and a hunch, she ducked in. She'd stirred up enough trouble in the past few days to get word going around - a street brawl here, a stolen bike there - and now all she could do was play the waiting game, keep herself on the radar until D'anclaude got his act together. Still, it never hurt to try to speed things up a little, so she leaned over the bar, giving the owner a good view of the circuitry beneath her wounds, and said, "Excuse me, would you happen to know of a man by the name Rene D'anclaude?"

"Never heard of him," the gruff voice of the barkeeper came back, but her attention had already switched to another area of the dank little room, one that had gone quiet and still at her words.

A tall, thick-bodied man in a faintly ridiculous cowboy hat-- didn't they know country singers were extinct?-- stood up and pointed. "Hey, it's that freak. The one who done us up good back on 32nd Street that time." He licked his lips. "Hey, freak, remember us?"

"Well, that's riiiiight!" His companion, a lanky man whose scarred face was abnormally pale and lined with garish purple lipstick, thumped the ground with his cane as if hearing a good joke. "Naomi Armitage. Illegal _Third-_ type robot, wanted for murder, destruction of police property and obstructing the political unification of the Mars-Earth government, among other things." He reached into his pants pocket and produced an impressive-looking wad of paper. "I suppose you're aware that there's a bounty on your head."

"What, you chuckleheads are bounty hunters now?" Oh yes, she remembered these two all right. She didn't know whether to groan or laugh out loud. "I'd like to see the weapon you're planning on taking me down with."

The bigger man reached beneath the coat he'd draped over his chair and produced a shoulder-mounted missile launcher. She sized it up in microseconds: yep, that thing fired armour-piercing, anti-tank rounds. _Shit._

He laughed, a clucking, gurgling sort of sound. "Will this do?"

But by the time he looked back to catch her eye, she was already gone.

 

"Hey, come back, will ya?" she heard the scrawny one call from behind. "We wanna play with you!"

Armitage, meanwhile, was putting as much distance between herself and them as possible: not difficult as long as she exploited the natural advantages of a Third, vaulting over buildings her "friends" had to go around the long way, sticking to the straight roads so she could maximise her speed. A part of her was proud she'd merited the expense, but that thing _was_ capable of putting a several-inch-wide hole through her torso. Of course, a shotgun to the head would be just as effective, but she knew, and apparently so did they, that making that shot wouldn't be easy. The reasonable alternative was to rip her chassis to shreds, _then_ put the bullet in her brain.

Neither of those would be happening tonight, however. She pulled up by a wall and leaned on it, giving her heart rate a moment to reset to normal. In just a few minutes she'd already covered enough ground that Bozo and Chump would need hours to catch up. By then, she'd be long gone.

"Finished so soon?" The reedy voice cut into her thoughts, backed up by a grunt and the dull thud of a chunk of metal being hoisted onto a shoulder. "How disappointing. We'd hoped for a more exciting chase."

She stared back into the eyes of the gaunt little man and his truck-like accomplice. "The hell?"

"Oh, you wanted to know how we got here so fast?" The gaunt one pulled up his pants leg, knocking twice on the metal with a fist. "It's amazing the upgrades you can come by on the grey market. And for a fraction of the price of going through Conception or any of those dopes." He flipped his cane upright, catching her chin with the end of it and holding it up. She knew from experience what that cane could do: secreted in the end was a stiletto blade, easily capable of puncturing her throat. And the wall was at her back. "Why, mademoiselle, you've been out of the loop too long. They're all the rage around these parts now."

Instinctively, she hissed, "Bastard," and instantly regretted it. With a twist of the cane, the blade shot out, its point barely nicking artificial flesh. From her side, she heard a muted clunk that was surely the launcher being loaded, though she couldn't turn her head.

The little man curled his lips in a sardonic grin. "Say bye-bye, birdie." He raised his free hand in a signal, followed immediately by a thump from her left and an agonised groan. The blade flicked away from her throat just long enough for her to duck under the cane and land a solid kick in Bozo's gut. Felling him, she kicked his free arm up behind his back and dug her heel into his spine-- a familiar interplay, though there was no time to savour it. She snatched the cane from his hand, then turned, Bozo still underfoot, to see what had become of Chump.

Even though she knew the answer before she turned her head, her heart still clenched at the sight. "...D'anclaude."

The newcomer stepped over his concussed opponent, aiming another kick as he did so that rolled Chump onto his back with a groan. "Lovely evening, isn't it? If it is evening." He stretched out a hand to the lukewarm air. "So hard to keep track here on Mars."

Armitage bit back a _Fuck you_ : she'd had her fill of petty rejoinders for one day. But curiosity overcame her. Of all the versions of this meeting she'd played out in her head, Rene D'anclaude pulling her ass out of the fire had not been one of them. "Why'd you save me?"

"Well, you obviously want something from me," D'anclaude replied with a smirk. "I thought it would be more interesting to find out what it is."

He waved his hand to indicate the fallen thugs. "I might recommend a different location for our tête-à-tête, however. The company here is quite distasteful."

Without warning, Armitage flicked the cane-blade at D'anclaude's sleeve, ripping through his coat and a good portion of flesh. Over his yelps of protest, she noted the rich, oozing blood and the distinct lack of circuitry beneath the parted skin.

"Just checking you're the real one," she said. "Okay. Let's talk."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't seen the OVAs, you missed out on meeting Bozo and Chump - as Armitage dubs them - the first time around. As antagonists, they stuck in my mind despite only having a brief appearance, so I decided to bring them back for another whirl.


	4. 3: With A Daughter's Love

"It's about the Thirds, isn't it?"

Armitage's expression tightened and she said nothing, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of hearing her ask, _How did you know?_

He answered her unspoken question anyway, sweeping his hand in a graceful arc to indicate the ruined church around them. "This must be a place of some nostalgia for you. The selfsame spot on which you chose to claim your inferior birthright, flaunting it to the world." His features sank into a peaceable smile. "For some reason, you hoped the memories of this place would influence my decision, though you must know that my associations with it are quite different from yours. Evidence of your weak intellect."

His casual putdowns made her blood rise, and with it, an old question-- one she'd also asked on this very spot, not knowing that D'anclaude could have provided the answer-- came floating to the surface. "If you have so much contempt for the Thirds, why did you insist on making us?"

He _tut_ ted at her as if the answer should have been obvious. "Money and influence, my child. Money and influence! The same reason I sold you all down the river when the Earth Federation came a-knockin'." 

He rested his chin on his hand as he watched her, all calm unconcern: the only flicker of excitement he showed was the amusement in his eyes at Armitage's own inability to keep her emotions under control. "You've surely surmised that Dr. Asakura was the one responsible for all that lovey-dovey, baby-making-robots nonsense. I designed the Thirds as machines: as capable assassins, to be sold to the highest bidder. I have no personal interest in Martian separatism, but if the government had wished to establish an armed force to repel Earth, and my assassinroids could have been of some assistance..." He spread his hands wide.

"Of course, then the tides turned, as they so often do, and Mars and Earth decided to forge an alliance. So I privately made it known to certain key members of the Earth Federation that, as the designer of the Thirds, I would prove most capable of removing them from Martian society-- for a price."

"So we were just weapons to you." She knew the answer shouldn't have surprised her, yet she still felt her stomach turn sour. The whole scenario-- the fact that her father was gone, his children dying; the way he'd called her "my child", the way those words had torn at her and exposed to her her own longing, the foolish, stupid hope she held even now that he could give her something like that back again-- was making her feel sick.

"Did you expect more?" His smirk told her that he knew she did, and she refrained from punching him only with very great effort. "Why _did_ you seek me out again, Naomi Armitage?"

She swallowed, trying desperately to rid herself of the trembling in her throat. _When my voice comes out,_ she told herself, _it will come out strong._ But her body betrayed her, and all she could manage was a hoarse, "I want the Thirds to continue. To live." She forced herself to look at him. "I want to know what you know. How to create us."

D'anclaude laughed, a high, ringing sound. "Of course. Self-preservation instinct - such a base function. And what exactly made you think I would give you that? After the lengths I went to to eliminate your kind."

"I didn't, if I'm honest. You're the one who wanted to talk." Her hand went to her holster. "I planned on force."

He looked over the weapon now being aimed at his forehead. "Very nice," he said. "Kill me, and I'll never be able to--"

He didn't get to finish his sentence, as Armitage's other hand had plunged a stun rod into his thigh.

"Reveal the information?" she said to his unconscious form, her voice shaking with a mixture of anger and desperate, misplaced love. "Oh, I don't think we'll have a problem with that."

 

Julian let out a low whistle at the sight of Armitage, D'anclaude slung over her shoulder in a fireman's lift. "Wow. Didn't think you'd be back so quickly."

After their last conversation, Armitage had set up a remote viewer linked to the backup server, so that she could communicate with the world inside the program without having to link up herself. It made sense given what she was about to do: she'd need to receive information that only the server had access to, while she herself operated in the physical world. The viewer currently relayed Julian's image and voice to a monitor, while on Julian's end, an image of the room was projected.

"Have a little faith," she replied with a smile, though she wasn't really feeling it. So many emotions clashed within her: the residual anger and confusion of before, mixed with the anxiety of _what if this doesn't work? What if I can't handle him and he kills me, and destroys Julian's backup too?_ ; and hope, the everpresent heady throbbing of hope, the possibility that this could work, that the Thirds would live. That Julian would be whole again.

_That I'll have a family again._

Almost immediately she winced: she _had_ a family. But-- no, there wasn't time to dwell on that now. She had to move quickly, before he woke up.

She heaved D'anclaude's limp body into the upload chair, then cuffed him to it by his ankles and wrists, cranking the metal rings tight. Brainwave stimulation would automatically open his eyes: she didn't have to do so manually as she adjusted the head brace and retinal scanner to his face, where even in unconsciousness, the ghost of a smile still floated on his lips. She had to resist the urge to falter, to stop and stare and wonder what drove that undying smile.

Another swell of emotions rose in her-- _I love you. I hate you._ She shook her head slightly, trying to shake off the conflict. It had been a reflexive motion, not intended to be seen, but Julian picked up on it, and his expression on the screen shifted.

"You okay, Armitage?"

"I'm fine." She glanced up at the screen. "Ready to receive?"

"Ready. I'll scan his memories and capture all the information related to the creation of the Thirds. If he knows as much as he ought to, that should be more than enough for us to reconstruct the process."

"All right. I'm throwing the switch."

D'anclaude's head jerked inside the brace, and his eyes flew open, his expression transformed from peaceful into a mute, frozen shock. Armitage knew it wasn't painful-- she'd done this enough times before herself-- but all the same, it was disconcerting to watch. She turned away.

"Upload 35% complete," announced Julian. He held up a nagging finger, grinning playfully. "You know, there's got to be several different major laws against what we're doing. Intellectual property law not the least of them."

Out of the swirl of emotions she was feeling, sadness rose up, and manifested itself on her features. "There are already several major laws against our existence." Her eyes lingered on the flickering lights of the databank behind Julian's head: out of focus, but anything to avoid looking at him directly, even in image.

His voice softened. "I know. I was just kidding." But her eyes remained fixed.

Not long after, the soft whir of machinery powering down let them know that the transfer was over. "I think we got everything," said Julian, but Armitage wasn't listening. Her gun was trained on D'anclaude, who was in the process of waking up. Julian fell silent.

D'anclaude's first response was to tug against his fetters, jangling them loudly. "The hell?" His gaze jumped to Armitage. "You!"

She couldn't hold back a small laugh, bitter as it was. "Who else?"

He glanced around at the machinery encasing him, the scanners still in position around his eyes. "Now I get it. Clever girl." The self-satisfied smile reappeared on his face. "You've stripped all the data you needed out of my memories. And now it's in that backup server of yours, you don't even _need_ me any more." His lip curled. "So you'll prove how much you don't, in a poetic demonstration of how the child has surpassed the father. Excise all your daddy issues with a bullet from a gun."

Armitage's hands trembled on the weapon.

"Oh, did I hit where it hurts? I'm sorry, but I find it hilarious. The little flawed creation come crawling back to her creator, hoping to find some sympathy. I made an origami crane once and burned it with a lighter. Do you think it thought of me as its father before it died? Hahahaha!" His chest shook with the force of his laughter, spittle shining on his lips. "And now you're going to kill me. Why, because you don't want to admit that someone like me could have had a hand in making you? Or are you taking revenge for Asakura? --oh, that's priceless. Killing one daddy to avenge the other. You really _are_ a mess."

"Revenge?" Her fingers clenched and relaxed, unsure whether to grip the gun harder or throw it to the floor. "But you had nothing to do with the attack on Danich Hill. We know who squealed, and it wasn't you."

He spread his hands, as much as he could in cuffs. "I didn't have to. By setting events into motion as I did, a little push _here_ , a little shove _there_ , it was almost guaranteed you'd end up there anyway-- and under warrant for military elimination. Like a carefully-placed bomb." His grin grew wider. "Didn't you think of that? Oh, this is even better! What a note to go out on! --Oh, you're really a star, Armitage. I'm glad I got to have this laugh before I die." His voice fell to a low purr. "So how do you feel? Knowing you made daddy happy one last time."

Julian's voice came through in lo-fi. "Don't listen to him, Armitage."

"If you must know," she said, struggling to keep her voice even, "I don't--" _I don't want to,_ she'd almost said. But she wouldn't let him have that satisfaction. "I don't have a choice." Her gun was still aimed at his head. "If I don't kill you, you'll kill the Thirds. If I don't kill you, everything I'm doing here will be meaningless." One corner of her mouth quirked up, a restrained sob. "I'm sorry."

The expression on D'anclaude's face was unaffected. "You keep telling yourself that, dear."

Armitage fired.

 

"...Armitage. Armitage!"

She came around to the sound of Julian's voice over the speakers, and the feeling of something drying on her skin. Tears, maybe; or-- She put a hand to her cheek. It came away with clear flakes, but also rusty red.

Her voice was hoarse when she tried to use it. "...I blacked out?"

"More like a buffer overflow. You were trying to process a lot of emotions-- I think it was too much for you to handle. Your system shut down to protect itself."

"So I blacked out." Her gaze drifted to where D'anclaude's body slumped in grotesque fashion, his arms and head still held up by the restraints even though the rest of him sagged; the force of the gunshot had caused his head to ricochet within the brace, embedding the metal deeply into flesh. It reminded her of that relief she'd seen in the church-- the god of the old Earth, come down to be tortured by his children.

D'anclaude had laughed when he'd seen it. _There are no gods on Mars any more._

If creators were gods, she thought with a chill, she supposed that was true.

The sudden thought-- _they're gone, they're both gone_ \-- wracked her body with spasms, and fresh tears cut through the blood on her face. "Julian," she whispered, curling in on herself, the ends of her hair brushing the dusty floor. "I need you here. I wish you were really here."

His voice was soft and strained, almost lost in the feedback from the speakers. _A ghost's whisper._

"I will be, Armitage. Soon."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how to tag for "complex feels about killing your genocidal quasi-father". Just fyi.


	5. 4: Through The Flames Of Hell

"Well, this all seems fairly straightforward." He caught Armitage's look of _you've got to be kidding me_ , and amended. "For us, I mean. Obviously there aren't that many humans who could grasp this kind of information, or carry out the necessary steps with precision. But for us, precision is normal... it's the fuzzy stuff that has to be specially programmed for. A Third like you should have no trouble."

Armitage nodded at the screen-simulacrum. "So what do we need?"

"The materials are going to be the hard part." Julian's eyes flicked up and down, evidently scanning a list, though to Armitage it was invisible: the output feed only rendered what it had to. "A bunch of this is stuff you can only get with a research licence." His eyes narrowed, the furrowed brow not rendered, but inferred by Armitage anyway.

"Tell me anyway."

"Ferroelectric polymerised fluoride. Monocrystalline silicon, intrinsic. Gallium arsenide..."

"--All standard. What else?"

"...let me finish, will you? ...Iridium phosphide. Approximately one billion kilometers' worth of miniaturised chalcogenide optic cables. Organic antimony. Ion accelerator, one." He raised an eyebrow at Armitage to make sure she was still listening.

"...Really a billion?"

"Actually a hundred thousand. They make up all the nerve relays in a cyborg's body, you know."

She reviewed her sources mentally. "Difficult, but not impossible. I know a few people on the slum side I can talk to."

Julian continued to read down the list, then hesitated. "There's something else here... I don't quite understand it. Give me a moment to make sense of this."

Armitage glanced around for a chair to pull up, but there wasn't one. The upload chair was the only seat in the room: a grand cathedral of metal and cabling, now seeming more ominous than majestic. She remembered how D'anclaude's blood had haloed it only yesterday, remembered freeing damp, cold hands from their fetters; remembered holding them, wishing for life, wanting to throw up.

For a moment, she could convince herself that a ghost of him still lingered there, watching her from that godly throne, judging. Was this what human madness was, she wondered? Or was it the spark that fired religion?

The world came back to her with Julian's voice. "Armitage. Listen to this."

"What is it?" She turned back to the screen.

"When the Thirds were made, they were produced by a large laboratory with a history of work on cyborgs and access to a lot of facilities. All the organic materials they needed could be replicated artificially-- already had been, actually, from clones upon clones stretching back through the history of Asakura's work. The need for an initial living sample had long since been eliminated."

She was starting to get where this was going. "But at some point, some form of human material was needed."

"Yeah, and-- not just any form." Julian's face contorted as if struck; she didn't know how much of it was really him, and how much was the computer's nearest approximation, but it worried her anyway. "A Third's brain is almost wholly artificial, but there are still some functions that can't be reproduced by hand - the values involved are too evasive of our current instruments to be simulated without the introduction of human-derived brain material. Specifically, in order for the material to integrate with the cyborg brain without introducing catastrophic personality conflicts, it had to be from a human who doesn't have a formed personality. A baby."

Armitage opened her mouth, then closed it again. Julian held off, giving her time to speak, to formulate her thoughts, but when no words seemed forthcoming, he slowly continued.

"Of course, the process of extracting this material is destructive to the human brain... fatal, actually. That's why... that's why Conception was the only company that ever came close to developing anything like the Thirds." His voice was growing more breathy as he decoded the memories that had been D'anclaude's. "Asakura was the only person in the business who was so passionate about creating true artificial life that he was willing to risk human life for it."

"Do you know... who...?" She let the thought trail off. She didn't know how to speak it, not without catalysing a chain reaction inside herself that she wasn't sure how to stop.

"The human subject?" The words came out tonelessly: past a certain absurdity of events, emotion itself began to seem surreal, an abstraction beyond the boundaries of shock. "Yeah. His daughter. Naomi."

 

"Julian." It had been uncomfortably long since either of them had spoken, and Armitage cringed at the sound of her voice in the empty room. She didn't want to have spoken, didn't want that echoing evidence hanging in the air. Speaking was being exposed, showing emotions, and she was alone with the person she least wanted to see them: herself. "I can't do this alone. I need to see you."

"Yeah," he said, softly. "I think I need to see you, too."

She climbed into the upload chair, feeling small and childlike in its embrace.

 

"It's awful," she almost whispered. She and Julian were sitting under a crude simulacrum of a tree, in a crude simulacrum of a park that he'd conjured in an attempt to soothe them both. It reminded her of Asakura's gardens, and she wasn't sure whether that soothed her or not. She wasn't sure whether soothing was what she wanted. It hurt, but--

She paused to pluck at the simulated grass, distracting her hands - and mind - with the repetitive motion. She couldn't say these words and think about what Julian might have to say, couldn't say them thinking that he might not understand. He was the only one who'd ever be able to understand. He had to, or it would crush her-- more than the revelation itself.

She could live with that, live with the conflict fermenting in her mind, if she didn't have to face it alone.

"--But it's beautiful, too," she managed, eventually. "He loved us enough that he killed his daughter for us. His real daughter, flesh and blood." The glittering in her eyes made her look both passionate and afraid: burning, burning, yet so far from comfort. Like stars, Julian thought. "Doesn't that mean we're worth something? Doesn't that mean we're worth keeping alive?"

"I think we've always been worth something," he said. "Whether Asakura loved us or not." It clearly wasn't the answer she'd been expecting, and she turned to him as if to read certainty in his expression. He schooled it as much as he could into an appearance of the same. He felt his words were true enough, but the question didn't mean much to him: it was her he had to convince.

"We're alive, aren't we? We think. We feel. We have needs. It doesn't matter if we were made to be assassins or baby-machines or--" He saw Armitage flinch at the latter statement. "--Sorry. But, you know? I'm not saying it's not good to be loved." He leaned over and rested both hands gently on her shoulders. "I'm saying that if we want to live, then that's the only reason we need."

She looked down at the ground, despite his tenderness. "But will you hate me if I..." She couldn't say the words.

"If you do what you think's right? If you try to save us?" He withdrew his hands, flopping back onto the grass with a sigh. "I don't know what's right, Armitage. I really don't know what I'd do if I were you. But I believe in you." He tried to smile, though it came out looking glitchy, lopsided. "He made you smart."

That seemed to buoy her courage, and finally she faced him. "I want to follow in my father's footsteps. I want our kind to live. At-- at any cost."

"Then I'll support you," he said. "All the way. Even if we burn for it."

"You realise that's not unlikely," she said quietly. "If the Earth Federation ever finds out about the history of the Thirds, they'll torch the whole planet to get to us."

"You heard me, didn't you? I said all the way." He reached out and pressed her hand in his.

 

In the harsh non-light of Martian day, however, the task she'd been convinced of seemed much less possible. As she'd promised, they'd gathered all the other materials with relatively little trouble-- less trouble, anyway, than Julian had expected-- but every time she thought of carrying the plan through to its final stage, she froze.

It wasn't the thought of the child-- _her daughter_ , she reminded herself, but the words were empty now and she knew they had been all along-- that stilled her, not really. She barely knew her, and as newly-formed as she was, there was little to know. A baby couldn't conceive of wrongdoing, couldn't anguish over a life cut short, had no memories or notions that would die with her body. She was just one life, unknowing, incapable, that could grow to be one human among billions of others-- or stave off the extinction of a race teetering on its brink.

What was one life, one small life, when compared to all that the Thirds were and could be-- and would never be, if not given this chance?

 _But... Ross._ Ross who had saved her. Ross who had loved her. Who loved this child, no doubt, and took for granted as an Earthling the inviolable sanctity of human life, would fight to preserve this one small life as she fought to preserve everything she knew.

The gap between them, so easy to obscure with loving words, now yawned abyssally before her. On Earth, as a human, the murder of one of one's own was a tragedy. On Mars, as a Third, it was inevitability. She'd learned that. The sanctity of life wasn't something she could take for granted: it was something she had to fight for, something she had to craft with her own hands and shield with her own body.

She knew, no matter how much she loved him and how deeply he loved her, that he would plead the right of her child to live over the right of all her kind, and that to suggest otherwise would tear him apart. Simply because the child was human. No matter what trials they faced, what words they confessed to each other, that would never change.

And yet how she wished. She loved him with such ferocity, _stupid human, stupid Earthling,_ man of that undying race who would never know what it was to be the last.

 

It was that, more than anything, that drove her decision to face him directly. She could take the child in the dead of night, disappear somewhere they wouldn't be found-- but she couldn't leave him without at least an explanation. It meant facing the force of his hatred, and severing with certainty all that they had. But at least he'd have closure. Perhaps his grief would dull with time, in a way it wouldn't if they vanished without a trace, leaving him to contemplate the unknown.

Their neighbourhood looked surreal, now, in this different light. She'd come here once as someone hoping to be part of it, knowing she'd never truly belong, but imagining, at least, that she could keep up the façade, and maybe feel a little like this was home. Now that she walked through it with a murderer's purpose, everything beautiful about it rang hollow to her, alien. There was nothing in a place like this for her, and every comfort it promised was an illusion, meant only for the person she pretended to be.

And yet this was home to Ross: a real home, somewhere he felt welcomed. Did that mean the Armitage he loved was the fake one: an illusion that could live humanly, not the robot she was? Her thoughts looped infinitely, pointlessly, tangling around each other with no outlet or purpose: she felt as if a net were closing in on her, strangling and crushing her, and all of it the creation of her own mind.

She paused by her own door, leaning against the entryway, suddenly struck by a warm rush of weakness. It took her a moment to recognise it as the urge to shut down, to protect her mind by surrendering to blackout. She closed her eyes and fought for control of her body, letting her head rest against the door's cold metal and soak up its chill.

Until it opened.

"Armitage?" Ross moved forward to catch the wavering cyborg, bracing her easily against his side. "I heard someone moving around outside-- God, you look like hell. No offence. What happened?"

The slight rasp in his voice, the warmth of his support, was more than she could stand strong against, and she felt herself sinking powerlessly into his arms.

 

 _Another blackout,_ she thought as she came to, feeling the dull tingle of diagnostic routines running through the back of her brain. Should that really happen so frequently? Maybe she really was dying, then, herself.

She rolled onto her back, her attention drawn to the ceiling by the soft pattering of rain on glass. It hadn't been raining when she got here.

"...How long was I out?"

"Long enough to make me worry." A chair by the bedside creaked, and Ross's shadow cut through the dim artificial light. "What's going on, Armitage? You're gone for days, you show up here looking worse than I've seen you since you pulled that self-destruct stunt back at Shinora, and then you're blue-screening on me."

She tried for words, but they wouldn't come. Now that she was here, with Ross caring for her, her thoughts of before seemed so hard to express. _Maybe I should just stop here,_ she thought tiredly. _I don't have to do this._ But she knew that was a lie.

"Look," Ross continued, "if this is about before... I'm sorry." He sighed, leaning forward and resting his hands on his knees. "I've had some time to think while you've been gone, and what I said to you-- it wasn't fair. I shouldn't have tried to make you choose between your family and your future. I know they're both important to you. And, well... if going after that maniac's what you need to do, I won't stop you." His gaze panned over her, checking once more for signs of injury. "--Don't tell me he got to you already."

"...He's dead, Ross." Her chest shuddered with the beginnings of a sob. "I killed him."

He searched her face, not sure what to deduce from this admission. The thought of killing D'anclaude had never before moved Armitage to tears, or anything close. But then a thought came to him. "...Did you get what you needed?"

"Everything," she said, and that confused him more. "Actually... that's why I'm here. You-- you were wrong when you said you were making me choose between my family and my future. You weren't the one who made me. I never had a choice." She began to sit up. "I'm... here for our child."

 _Our child?_ "Hey, whoa, whoa," he said, getting up to place hands on her shoulders and dissuade her from moving further. "Look, I still don't know what's been going on, but you've clearly had some kind of a shock. You're not making sense. Just-- lie down for a while, sleep it off, okay? Whatever it is."

She pushed back at him, eyes insistent. _I have to say it now, or I never will._ "The design specifications for the Third types... they need... I need human materials. I can't save the Thirds without her."

"You're going to experiment on our daughter?" His hands gripped her more tightly. "Hell, no! What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking that one sacrifice can save our future."

"Shit, she's not a _sacrifice_ , Armitage! She's our _child!_ "

"And the Thirds are not just robots to me." _But maybe to you,_ she thought. "If the future of humanity depended on you killing just one Third, would you do it?"

"Armitage..."

"Would you?"

He turned away from her. "This is nuts. What's gotten into you lately?"

"Something that's always been in me." She understood it now. Her eyes shone with wetness, but there was a bitterness in her voice that she could not mask. "There was a flaw in my design."

"A flaw? You mean-- some kind of robot mental illness? A glitch?" He couldn't think of any other reason she'd be acting this way.

"Not a glitch. An oversight." The bitterness, even through her choked voice, had morphed into an edge of defiance. "I was programmed with-- with a mother's instincts... the desire to raise children, and protect them at any cost. But the people who created me were so blinded by their own nature that they forgot one thing." She swallowed hard around the last words. "A mother's instincts are for her own species."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...ffffff this was a hard one to write. Not just because it was longer than the others (I didn't want to split the tension at any point), but because of the subject matter. There's a delicate balance to be struck in writing something like this while still keeping the protagonist the protagonist, and I'm not sure I got it.
> 
> Feel free to concrit.


	6. 5: With Her Hands On The Switch

Ross sat back down, his chin tightly buried in his hands. If a man of his stature could be said to collapse in on himself, to seem to shrink under the weight of knowledge, then that was exactly what he was doing. "My god."

He couldn't very well blame Armitage, under the circumstances. She wasn't responsible for her own design. Still, all his worst fears about cyborgs, the ones he'd managed to push aside for Armitage's sake, were coming true. Dr. Asakura had, entirely accidentally, engineered a race that would literally stop at nothing to reproduce itself, even at the expense of humankind. It was like one of those old TV dramas coming to life, and the first words to come to his mind were drawn from just such an absurd scenario.

"He's created a monster," he muttered, not even meaning to speak out loud.

Armitage rose instantly, fists balled at her sides. "The _fuck_ I am!" Her voice was strained past breaking, the tears that had threatened before now falling freely. "Every single thing about my design that you consider 'monstrous' was taken from _your_ fucking species!" She jabbed a finger at his hunched form. "You as much as admitted you'd do the same! I'm not the monster here, Ross. In everything you fault me for, I am _disgustingly_ human."

They both recoiled from that blow, Ross chastened by Armitage's words, Armitage realising what that meant for her. If she was just another example of human monstrosity - a flawed, ugly thing, no better than the brutes that spawned her - then what was the point in preserving their lives? There was nothing special about them at all. They were just another offshoot of the human impulse to breed.

 _Father, you must have wanted me for something more than this,_ she thought desperately. _You didn't make me just to live out your own mistakes all over again. There's a reason we're alive, and I'll find out what it is._

She began to walk away. Ross raised a hand. "Wait!" She turned to face him. "Where are you going?"

"I told you," she said. "I came for our child."

"Armitage." He got up and followed her out of the room and into the hall, watching as she thought through her plan of attack. "You're-- you're right. You deserve to live."

Those were, if not the last words she'd expected to hear, very close to the bottom of the list. She stalled, looking back at him, examining his face for clues.

He put his hand to his chin again and sighed, struggling to internalise all that had just happened. "You're not a monster... you're no worse than any other living being trying to make its way. I'm just... I, _god_ , Armitage." He was suddenly aware of how much he was sweating, and he wiped his brow with a hand that, for all his pretence at self-control, shook slightly. "You've got me over a barrel here. I-- I need time to think."

The tension began to drain from her body. He was clearly devastated, but he was still trying, fighting to bridge a gap that she'd convinced herself was impassable. Fighting for her, not just their child.

She took a small step closer to him, taking him in. He evidently hadn't been planning on company when she came: he was dressed in just his sleep pants, exposing the full extent of his robotic torso. It made it a little easier on her to see him like that, to try to remember that he wasn't fully human any longer, either. Maybe that was why he hadn't completely turned away.

She reached out to touch his arm - the modified one - but he stiffened, and she pulled away too, as if burned. He shook his head.

"I need time," he repeated. "It's late. Maybe we should rest."

It was the first time in a long time that they hadn't shared a bed, but she knew without asking that it wouldn't be wanted, and retreated wordlessly to the couch. There was nothing to cover her, but it didn't matter: when she was functioning normally, she didn't feel the cold, and if anything, Ross kept the apartment a little hotter than she needed.

Probably for the baby. Did human babies like heat? She didn't really know.

It was to that thought, the continuing sound of rain, and the almost inaudible purr of her cooling systems, that she finally fell asleep.

 

And woke, not too long after, to the sound of crying.

She was still fighting for full consciousness when she felt Ross brush past her, and blinked as the room flooded with light. Her eyes adjusting, she fell into step behind him, causing him to turn to scrutinise her before, apparently, deciding he could trust her for now.

She'd never felt so intensely alien as she did watching Ross pick up their child, soothing and comforting with motions that, for all his hardened ex-cop manner, seemed to come naturally to him. The humanness of their bond burned almost visibly, and she felt its lack in her down to her core. Of this, the thing she should have known best, she was empty.

He read her expression, and when he spoke, his voice was clear, with no huskiness to it: he obviously hadn't slept. "You never did seem to relate to her. I thought it was a phase."

"I thought so too," she said. "The whole time she was inside me, I thought-- I really believed that I would love her, that I knew what to do. It wasn't even just a feeling, it... I was convinced, like everything in my life had been leading up to this point. I was so sure." She stared at the child, trying again to see if she could recapture that feeling, the feeling that had refused to come since she was born. "But once she was really here... it all fell apart. I searched inside myself so deep and I realised there was nothing."

"She wasn't the child you'd expected," he said almost casually, and her eyes shot up. "You believed, even though it was impossible, that what was growing inside you was a robot, like yourself."

"I... I guess I did." She'd never held the thought so completely before, and it surprised her. It was completely illogical; but it was what she'd felt.

He sighed a little. "Are we really so different? You were always the one who didn't want anyone to make a distinction. You said it yourself once-- we talk the same, walk the same, feel the same. Does it matter if your child is robot or human?"

"Yes, it does," she said. "And I don't even know that I can explain why. It just makes all the difference in the world." 

Ross's eyes closed, and when he opened them, for all that he was standing, he seemed to have shrunk into himself even further. "I shouldn't do this, Armitage. It goes against every law of _my_ biology. But I want your kind to survive, because _you_ want it, and I know no one else will help you." He held the swaddled baby out to her. "Take her. Don't tell me anything about it. I don't want to know."

The child, who had ceased crying at Ross's ministrations, now stiffened and struggled again in her arms. She looked to Ross, but he was looking away again.

"You know I love you," she said quietly to him, and then, when he showed no sign of responding, she was gone.

 

 _If I could have done something sooner,_ he thought as he heard the door click closed. _If I'd found a way to keep them from destroying Conception... she wouldn't have had to do this._

He rested his eyes on his palms, envisioning her face over and over until he could convince himself. _She didn't want to do this._

 _...God. The old Ross would have had me shot._ But he wasn't the old Ross any more. She'd changed him. He just couldn't work out if it was for the better.

Something flashed through his brain, jolting him into full consciousness. _Wait... destroyed? Conception_ wasn't _destroyed, not all of it. The main lab's gone, but the company..._ He scrambled for his phone, speed-dialling Armitage with sweat-slicked hands. _Please pick up. God, please pick up._

 

She picked up.

"Armitage! Do you think any of Conception's satellite labs-- _any_ of them-- might still have samples of the materials you need?" _The human parts,_ he chided himself, but there hadn't been time to search for a better word. "Even thought they didn't deal with Thirds, Asakura had to have kept some copies of his work somewhere other than his main laboratory. Even if just for backups."

"Satellite...?" She flicked her phone into video mode as she came to a halt. "--Oh. Oh god. I-- maybe. I don't know. Fuck."

"Or even Danich Hill." His voice sped up as this new thought came to him. "It was attacked, but how much was really destroyed? There could be things in the wreckage that could still help you."

"But it's got to be under heavy military guard."

He smiled. "We can take them. We did it last time."

She was about to agree, but then she ran the math. "Wait-- so we take countless lives to protect one. What's the logic in that?"

"It's their job. We killed scores of men back there before and I don't think you or I ever thought about it once afterwards." A pause, while he made some gesture off-camera that she couldn't quite see. "Life is more than just a numbers game, Armitage."

The statement bothered her in a way she couldn't quite pinpoint. "What _is_ the value of life, then?" A passerby turned to stare, presumably trying to figure out the young woman's motive for shouting existential questions into her phone, in the rain, while holding a baby and wearing what looked to be half an outfit. He continued on, having deduced nothing. "How do you tell? How do you know what's right?"

"It's--" He looked awkward. "God, if you don't know I can't explain it, kid. It's something you've just gotta feel. Weren't you a cop?" he chided gently.

"Maybe a bad one. --You mean the way I felt that I wanted to save the Thirds?"

He sighed heavily. "...Yeah. Yeah, I guess like that."

She thought about it for a moment. "Then I feel... we shouldn't go back to Danich Hill. It's too risky. But we'll try the other labs. If we're good, and we are, we should be able to sneak in without any trouble."

The image of Ross nodded, his shoulders sagging with relief. "Thank you." On the other end of the phone, he took in the rain around them. "You two should probably get out of the wet. You might not feel it, but she's gonna catch cold."

She couldn't help but laugh. "Silly Earth superstitions," she said, then noted his expression. "Okay, okay. I'll wait in a diner or something until the rain stops. But I gotta go see Julian... he'll want to know what's going on, too. Stop by the old place tomorrow when you've slept. We'll be there." She studied his still-not-entirely-settled face. "Promise."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title is a reference to the famous "trolley problem" in ethics. In the trolley problem, it's posited that a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people, who will be killed if it isn't stopped; on the other hand, the only way to stop it is by pulling a switch to move it to a different track, on which one person is standing. Would you kill the one to save the five?
> 
> A more detailed description of the problem is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem


	7. 6: In Search Of A Reason

"The old place" was Julian's old apartment, the base of operations for Armitage and Julian's interactions. Out of a need to provide a human identity for Julian, it had been fully paid off on his behalf by Asakura under an assumed parental name, so even after his "death" Armitage still had access. And she, of course, fully intended that Julian would live in it again some day.

When Ross got there the next morning, he found Armitage lying on the couch bed, the baby swaddled up in an old Apple box that had been appropriated as a bassinet. For all that the apartment was Julian's cover, it was anything but normal on the inside: furniture inside the two main rooms was minimal, the living room having been entirely taken over by the upload chair and assorted other devices, the bedroom a bare husk that contained the aforementioned items and little else. Cabling snaked between the rooms in every direction - along the floor, taped to the walls and ceiling - and the whole place hummed softly with the whisperings of machines.

 _This is how they live when left to themselves,_ Ross thought, but stopped the bigoted musing in its tracks. _No... this is how Julian lived. He was just a kid. Any geek kid living on his own in an apartment would treat it this way._

Armitage slowly roused herself at Ross's entrance, blinking furiously. It was always a little strange for him to watch her wake up: with no need to breathe, she didn't yawn like humans, just booted up with eyelids flickering like drive lights. It passed for human just fine - plenty of humans blinked away sleep - but he knew, and he noticed. There was a part of him that couldn't stop paying attention to her little tells, and he wasn't sure if it was simple affection or, more guiltily, the part of him that still wanted to differentiate her from human kicking in.

"Julian checked out the Conception labs," she said, her voice morning-groggy. It made him wonder how much she hadn't slept. "We've found two locations that look like they might be storing my father's work, though we can't get into any of it from here. Fortunately, all of the Conception satellites are so proud of their work, they only use robot guards."

Ross rubbed his chin. "Why is that a good thing?" He'd never known Armitage to be one for valuing human lives over robots.

Armitage tapped the side of her head and grinned. "Because I can hack them, or if I can't, Julian can. They've got some basic personality circuits which I can't override, but at the very least, I should be able to influence them enough to keep them from noticing we're a threat."

He smiled back at her. "Like a robot Jedi mind trick."

"Huh?"

He waved a hand. "Old Earth movie. _Seriously_ old. Don't mind me."

She got up from the bed, stretching as she began to move towards the living room. "Well, anyway, we'll be ready to go just as soon as I get finished on one little project."

He noticed she'd made no move to take the baby with her, even check on her, and he lifted her out of the box and into his arms before following Armitage in. "What's that?"

Kneeling down among the mess of electronics in the living room, she held up a small device that looked like a smartphone, wires still trailing from its guts. "Julian's coming with us."

 

Julian's "company" turned out to be a two-way video and data relay that Armitage wore on her shoulder, along with earpieces that allowed him to speak to them without being overheard. Using the relay, he could get a basic idea of what was going on, and through the earpieces he could offer advice if necessary, while the wires could plug into an I/O jack and allow him to hack Conception's machines from within the backup server.

"It's a pretty nice setup," he said to them. "Almost beats having my own body, getting Armitage to carry me around all day." On the screen, they could see him making a hand gesture suggesting the waving of palm fronds, which Armitage deliberately ignored.

"So which way now?" she asked, staring into the maze of identical-looking white corridors.

"Peel me a grape and I'll tell you."

"Oh, for _fuck's_ sake, Julian. Knock it off or I'll peel your head."

"You can't." Though she didn't look at the screen, she could tell he was sticking his tongue out in the pause. "I don't have a head any more. And besides, you need me."

"Then try holding up that argument by actually being useful."

Ross just smiled and shook his head, used to their playful rivalry-- playful, anyway, for a foul-mouthed ex-cop and a boy permanently on the cusp of teenhood, he thought as he listened to their strings of ever-more fiercely barbed invective, carefully weighted so it sounded like a routine they'd been perfecting for years. How long _had_ Armitage known Julian, he wondered? From what he could tell, they hadn't grown up together, yet they'd fallen into a familiar pattern from the get-go - one that was almost beautiful in its symmetry, its careful tension between teasing and care, never overstepping its bounds. It was as if they'd been made for it.

The thought doused him like a splash of cold water. Of course they had been made for it. That was why Asakura had gone to the effort of creating a young male Third: for the purpose of being a younger brother to Armitage, helping her to form a model of familial interactions-- to develop her brain for motherhood. It was so obvious he didn't know why he hadn't seen it before.

He decided not to say anything to Armitage. He knew she wouldn't want to believe what all this was pointing at: that she'd had no other purpose than to be a vessel, that the simplest explanation for her existence really was the correct one. That she'd been made to be a human mother and failed, in the first degree, due to Asakura's oversight; and that there was nothing more.

"Hey," Armitage called back after him. "Come on, hurry it up. He says it's this way."

 

"Nice," said Julian, appraising the towering white edifice they'd discovered. "Conception really never went in for understated, did they?"

The circular room of Conception's inner sanctum had been made to look like it was carved of marble, though its surfaces were obviously artificial. The walls were lined with server towers stretching to the ceiling, but the piece that was drawing all the attention was at the far end of the room: there, crowning a row of identical sealed chambers, was a massive bust resembling a half-human, half-robot woman. Split down the middle, the left side of her head opened to reveal a human brain, while the right side revealed circuitry and wires; her arms, likewise, half-encircled the room, the flesh of the left parted to show bone, the right to show electronics. Yet despite the rather gruesome-seeming imagery, her expression was serene, almost happy.

The fact that the woman looked not a little like Armitage was not lost on any of them.

"Okay," Armitage said to Julian. "I'll hook you up to one of these servers and you get started on breaking in. Download anything that looks useful, but more than anything I want to get in those sample chambers."

"Got it."

She tethered the cables to a computer and left the relay sitting there on the ground - it was strange to see his face, deep in concentration, appearing so tiny from across the room - as she went to examine the chambers. They weren't labelled, of course, with anything useful, but the white plastic of them was faintly translucent, and she could make out from their frosted interiors that they probably held specimens.

She kneeled down and traced her fingers over the compartments, feeling their chill and wondering. Was the brain in here that had made her own? The only begotten daughter of Dr. Asakura-- _begotten_ , here, being the operative word-- who had been given in sacrifice for the Thirds, for something that her father had believed in more than human life itself. The sculpture above her, with its contemplative smile, embracing arms, seemed to suggest that she should feel something holy here-- and for the first time ever in a situation like this, bowed before an idol, in the presence of sacred flesh and blood, she did.

There was a quiet hiss and a rush of cool air from behind her, and a second later Julian announced that the chambers were unlocked, as if she couldn't have guessed. "But wait," he said. "There are some other files here-- Asakura's personal records. Journals."

She nodded. "I said download anything interesting, right? But do it quick - we shouldn't hang around here too long. You can read it to me on the way out." Her hands flitted over the chamber windows. "Any idea which of these we should open?"

"NV-22." There was something strange, weighted in Julian's voice that she couldn't quite pinpoint.

Ignoring it for now, though filing it away in the back of her mind, she slid open the little compartment and, with hands invulnerable to the cold, lifted out the specimen jar and placed it in the cooling case they'd brought with them. The object inside was a small thing, grey and shrivelled, seemingly devoid of any life; but then, one wouldn't look at a circuit board and expect life, either. Appearances were often deceiving, and life, like Ross had said, was an intangible thing, something that existed between the numbers.

"Okay," she said, hefting the case up onto her shoulder and heading back to disconnect the relay. "Are you done downloading?" He nodded. "So about those files you were talking about." When she got no response, she frowned at the screen. "Come on, what is it?"

"Just... I don't think you're gonna want to hear this. That's all."

As soon as he said it, she knew she didn't, but now she needed to know. "Please."

"All right." He began to read from the file. " _Earth date June 22nd, year 2160; Martian date Capricornus 11th, year 93._

_My work on converting the 'Assassinroids' to full 'Third-types', who will live and work peacefully in Martian society, is finally reaching its climax. With the first prototype, Naomi Armitage, found to be operational in all necessary ways, I am confident that we now stand facing a new Martian dawn: a Mars that, no longer reliant on Earth immigration, can truly seek independence._

_To build a robot that can birth human children and fully integrate into their society has been my highest goal, and now I have reached it. I admit that I struggle with the question of how the Thirds might, themselves, take the knowledge of their purpose; but I plan to ensure that they do not find out. If it were possible, which unfortunately it is not, they would not even know they weren't human._ "

Julian paused, noting Armitage's expression. "...Should I stop?"

But Armitage ignored him, turning to look at the idol that seemed to float above the chambers, rapt, she thought now, in the oceans of its ignorance.

"So my father..." she began, weakly, but Julian could see the torrent welling up in her, and knew to expect it to burst. "My father wasn't a god... he was a _monster!_ "

Her eyes flashed with rage, boring into the statue's impassive face. "He didn't have any dreams for us! He was just going to-- to make us and abandon us, without _any_ knowledge of what we were! He didn't even want us to know!" She was crying and screaming now, her voice echoing around the faux-cathedral, and Julian and Ross exchanged wary glances. They'd disabled most of the security bots on their way here, but they couldn't be sure that there weren't others.

"Come on," said Ross, putting a hand on her shoulder. On the screen, he could see that Julian longed to do the same. "You're alive now, and that's what matters. It's okay."

"It's not okay," she almost whispered. "But it will be."

_Maybe my father had no real purpose for us, but I know that robots are worth something more. I know in my heart there's a reason for us to exist, and I'll pour that knowledge into every one of the Thirds I create._

_If the robots of this world have no god... then I will become one. For them._


	8. Epilogue: So Very Brightly

"It's pretty weird," said Julian, watching Armitage work from the monitor. "Thinking that I'm going to have your brain."

Armitage paused from the incredibly delicate operation-- isolating, under a microscope, individual strands of the cloned neuroconnective tissue and transferring them to the mainboard. "It's not just my brain. It's the same material all the Thirds had. Your brain was made of the same stuff originally, you know."

"I guess," he said. "I suppose the weird part is watching you do it, knowing where it came from."

"Then don't watch."

He smiled: a strange smile that made something twist in the bottom of her stomach, because it was an exact reflection of something that was already there. "It's hard not to. I never got to see my own body being built before." He looked down at Armitage's half-finished work, the metal chassis still exposed, the gleaming pulse of life unconscious, yet active, already flickering within the chest cavity. It would be warm for him, when she was done, with none of the shock of an initial boot: he would simply step into his new life.

"It's weird for me too, you know," she said quietly, after a while. "You're supposed to be my brother, but there's something in this, in all of this, that makes me feel-- more like a mother." She tensed, expecting him to laugh or blow her off, but he didn't. "And I don't know if I want that with you. It-- doesn't feel wrong, exactly, but I'm not sure how it's supposed to feel. I don't know what the rules are any more."

"There are none." He said it as if it were obvious. "No one's ever done anything like this before. We're the first. And however it makes us feel is however we feel."

"Even if that means redefining everything we know about each other?"

His image on the screen shrugged. "I'm not sure how it could mean anything else."

He said it casually, but there was something about knowing that Armitage had handled his very brain, constructed the strands of code that would bind soul to body, that made him feel anything but casual. Her image flickered before his eyes, taking on a different meaning each time he looked: sister-- mother-- creator-- god. He would have laughed at that last - his brash, rash, completely _un_ serene sister, a god? - but laughter felt impossible. It was as if he were watching, from that formless realm from which the soul originates, his body being knitted together in the womb.

Humans talked about gods like they knew it all, but what human had ever witnessed themselves created? And what human would go on being shaped by their creator even years afterwards, with every repair that needed doing, every glitch that needed ironing out - whether they could bear it or not, whether they knew what to do with the awe, the love, with the absolute surrender of self?

 _We're so vulnerable,_ he thought, and then, on the heels of that awareness, _Armitage was right. If she hadn't saved us, our traces would have vanished, unsung, into the ether like tears in rain._

A voice brought him out of his reverie, faint and unsure. "Can you-- try it out? I need to test a few things."

His hologram-self nodded, glancing at the projected image of his soon-to-be body: lying prone, metal heart blinking, cables trailing from the head.

He felt suddenly small. "Is it gonna hurt?"

"A little."

He walked over to the body-projection and lay down where it lay, and saw, vaguely, as if it were only a suggestion to his mind, Armitage plugging a cord into his chest. An incoherent burst of sound and colour spasmed across his mind, and then--

\--the whitest fire--

\--the cosmos, unravelling--

 

\--Numbers. Numerical patterns that organised themselves into strands of meaning, that corresponded to the impact of photons upon neuroreceptors forming the three-dimensional image of a woman, backlit, a cable that ran from her to him--

"Julian. It's me." A hand reached down through waves of glitches, lifting him upright. "You're alive."

 

Just then, the door burst open, and Julian's newly-calibrated optics were dazzled by the intrusion of flashlights.

"Naomi Armitage, Special A-Class," one of the squadron said. Two others moved forward, the gleams of light reflecting from their barrels suggesting the vague shape of anti-tank weaponry. "We have this place surrounded. Remain where we can see you. Hands behind your back..."


End file.
